


It’s Never Goodbye

by Evalie_Soto (Missalyssasecret)



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Acceptance, Canonical Character Death, Episode: s02e13-14 Such Sweet Sorrow Parts 1-2, F/M, Hopeful Ending, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2019-12-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:40:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22041229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missalyssasecret/pseuds/Evalie_Soto
Summary: Katrina Cornwell knows she’s making the right decision when she pulls the manual release for the blast doors.After everything, she’s prepared for it.  Turns out, the universe owes her one.
Relationships: Katrina Cornwell/Original Universe Gabriel Lorca
Comments: 13
Kudos: 38





	It’s Never Goodbye

" _And Chris? Whatever your path may be, you can handle it._ "

Katrina smiles one last time, the jangling nerves gone to steel in her spine. 

Christopher Pike is a great Starfleet Captain, but more importantly, he’s a very good man. In the end, she couldn’t take the risk of his sacrifice, not when there was another option.

That option happened to be her own life, but who was really counting?

She’s not frightened of death, of the nothingness that will follow. They’ve all lived more in the last two years than most people will in a lifetime or more. Loved and lost and laughed and lamented, and now with the chance to save Starfleet and the universe? Well, her existence hardly seems like a fair trade to have it done, but that’s how the cards fell.

There’s seconds remaining.

Katrina closes her eyes. She’s been in near-death situations before, either too keyed up from adrenaline to panic or just too professional to admit it. Afterwards, she’d always found a safe place to collapse in her own fears, to let out the emotions. In this moment though, she’s calm.

Her time is over. This universe needs the Tillys and Stamets and Pikes, and she knows they’ll achieve marvelous things. The time for her, for Pippa and Gabriel, has come to a close.

Everything goes still and silent for a fraction of a second.

 _This is it_ , she thinks, _Godspeed Enterprise and Discovery and Burnham._

For a moment, there’s blinding heat and pain and she opens her mouth to scream, and then-

Nothing.

********

**_Thud. Thud. Thud._ **

Katrina didn’t grow up with a belief in an afterlife of any significant sort. She’s enough of a scientist to understand what happens when biological functions cease. She’s also enough of an explorer to wonder if there’s something more.

For being dead, it sure felt an awful lot like her heart was still beating. 

”Katrina.”

She turns around so fast that her head spins, is steadied by a pair of very familiar arms. Arms she knew she could never feel again.

”Gabriel?”

Her Gabriel, not the twisted Mirror Universe mockery of the gentle, curious, courageous man she’d gone through the Academy with. The man who crawled out from under the table with her the morning after Pippa drank them all down, hair a bird’s nest and face set in an almost comical expression of hungover regret. The man who celebrated her promotion to the Admiralty with a bottle of wine and a surprise trip to the botanical gardens on Verundia Prime where they made love under the purple branches and silver vines, laughing as they picked leaves from each other’s hair. 

The man who, in another life, she would have given anything to keep by her side.

Slowly, Katrina opens her eyes.

”Hello Kat.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first Trek fic I’ve written in about twenty years. After watching Admiral Cornwell’s demise, I couldn’t let it end there.


End file.
